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The EU is Banning Almost All Coal Mining on Jan 1 (futurism.com)
Every unprofitable coal mine in the European Union must cease production by the first day of 2019, the date on which all public funds for the mines will come to an end. From a report: In Spain, that means that 26 coal mines are about to close up shop, according to Reuters. This move away from coal is a refreshing bit of bluntness -- letting the failed remnants of a fossil fuel industry fade away -- compared to how the federal government in the U.S. is grasping at anything to keep coal alive. But it remains to be seen how much of an impact the coal closures will have in the ongoing effort to curb climate change. The deadline was set back in 2010 as the EU sought to move away from fossil fuel dependence, according to Telesur. The EU wanted to end public aid to coal mines sooner, but groups from Germany -- which shuttered its last coal mine earlier this month -- and Spain are responsible for extending the deadline all the way to the end of 2018.
Subsidies in general I'm against...
However the real question is - will this have any impact or energy prices or availability in the EU, or in Spain?
If not, great. But if it does cause prices to rise, or it means electricity becomes more reliably... well then perhaps there was more to the subsidy than just supporting coal.
Ending the use of coal is a noble goal, if for no other reason than the reduction of real pollution. But we also have to be careful not to leave too many people out in the cold, to have alternatives.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Well, those instances of the human race that do not prioritize species survival, will not survive. But apparently that is too hard to grasp because it is quite a while in the future. Bust thanks for illustrating the fundamental nearsightedness of most people. Also, Science is not Religion. One is for people with working minds, the other is for the rest.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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This will hopefully drive the cost of business for US coal miners way up
Not many mines will close. The EU gets about 21% of their electricity from coal, and that isn't going to change.
Only the mines receiving taxpayer subsidies will close. Most likely the production will shift to the profitable mines, making them even more profitable.
Importing from America doesn't make much sense because of transport costs, but there are some imports.
The real question is why are we providing welfare for the mediocre?
When you combine socialism with democracy, there is pressure from the electorate to preserve jobs in declining industries. This leads to Lemon Socialism, where public funds are used to prop up losers rather than backing winners.
It is good to see the EU finally pulling the plug on subsidized coal mines, but they need to go much further.
Citations please.
We don't even need to get that far. It's about *unprofitable* coal mines. That absolutely doesn't mean this is a move away from coal. This just means this is a move away from unprofitable coal mines. Expected consequences are a loss of many jobs and the accelerated profitability of the remaining coal mines, which is probably going to be pretty easy once we have gotten rid of all the unprofitable ones. Another possible consequence for Germany (for instance) is the future need to import coal from less picky countries. :D
I totally agree that thousands and thousands of scientists across many disciplines,, most who have never talked, seen, or even heard of each other, have somehow conspired to take as much money as possible by lying to the public. It's amazing how they do it!
I mean I even heard someone say the temperature has increased by 1C over the last hundred years. We've only had satellites since 1979.
Iron Maiden are an English heavy metal band formed in Leyton, East London, in 1975 by bassist and primary songwriter Steve Harris. Can you spell non-sequitur?
EU countries will just import more coal from overseas.
Press F to send an FU to all of the obsolete coalies who'll no longer have a part in fouling the air with CO2. Glad the EU is doing the right thing and not subsidizing environmental depredation.
Well, with the closing of many spanish and german mines, the polish and bulgarian ones will probably get a lot more profitable, and I too doubt they will stop :)
Every unprofitable coal mine in the European Union must cease production
Yes, because in capitalism, unprofitable coal mines would be kept afloat instead. :-p
Ezekiel 23:20
They're NOT picking winners and losers any more. They're just letting the unprofitable coal mines go away.
When you combine socialism with democracy, there is pressure from the electorate to preserve jobs in declining industries. This leads to Lemon Socialism [wikipedia.org], where public funds are used to prop up losers rather than backing winners.
Isn't that what trump is doing with coal?
They cannot get "profitable" - they are producing heavily subsidized coal for the local electricity and pollution generation. To become "profitable" the local electricity prices or the costs will have to go up sharply, and that's not happening. The first because electricity prices are "stabilized", and the second because there is no money to fund plant upgrades.
The optimistic, bullshit tone of the quoted web site and the summary are hardly warranted.
You are fatally wrong. I do know how scientific funding works. Strongly advising hard real-world changes is one of the ways to not get funding for your research. Why do you think climate scientists have been so tame when the models did reliably predict the catastrophe to come about 30 years ago? Simple: They did not want their funding to dry up and did hope the human race would realize how bad things are without them pushing. They have now realized that the human race is far too stupid for that and have started pushing _despite_ the negative effects on their funding, because of pure desperation.
As to the past measurements, why on earth do you think measuring temperatures requires satellites of all things? What these older records use is thermometers and records on paper. What then needs to be adjusted (and the adjustments are entirely legitimate) is the extrapolations of the localized measurements.
How anybody at this time can still think this whole thing is not real and not very dire is beyond me. People like you will probably deny there is a problem while in the process of dying from its effects.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The problem with climate change is some people like to believe it isn't true, because it means they are in some way special and "in the know".
But they are idiots. The science is a provable done deal at this point. Twenty years ago, having some skepticism was sensible (and it always makes sense to be skeptical of motivations -- Al Gore, I'm looking at you), but man-made climate change is just impossible to refute without resorting to a conspiracy that includes basically every climate scientist and body in the world working in coordination, including fake temperature measurements from a huge array of sources. It just isn't plausible. Plus, we are experiencing the exact instability that the models predict, so we would need to be faking pretty much all the global news on storms, etc.
But you know what, even if there was doubt (there isn't), would it not be a good idea to err on the side of caution and not pump huge amounts of shit into the atmosphere?
So you think what will get human civilization ended is the inability of most people to distinguish Science from Religion? Would not surprise me in the least.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You are incapable of distinguishing Science from non-science. Explains a lot.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The ending of government subsidies to coal mines will have an equalising effect on the cost of coal (up to the new cost of production) making it easier for renewables to compete on an even playing field.
Lignite mining is cheap enough that running the coal plants from it is not a big deal. Whether electricity prices are "stabilized" is debatable, though. They vary from year to year. Right now, they've actually risen by about 50% around here - exactly thing you claim isn't happening is happening (are you Trump?).
Ezekiel 23:20
They can always export to China. Its good quality coal right? ... Top quality.... ?
What fails to get consumed in the EU is now free for export deals.
No work and they cant even keep their exports going.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
He is doing this because there is still a lot amount of coal based power plants in Appalachia and it keeps West Virginia happy. Obama thoroughly pissed off the state by trying to kill coal and it went quite red after decades of democrat union rule.
Isn't that what trump is doing with coal?
No. It is what he promised to do, but did not follow through.
American coal mines are continuing to close, as they should. Production is increasingly concentrated in a few big mines in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming, which produces more coal than the next four states combined.
We know climates change. The effects are less well known however. We know a little bit from geology but even there the results of mass extinctions were at least partially if not wholly caused by the event itself and not directly a result of the climate on its own.
The other problem we don't know is the economics. How will it affect progress? How will you pay for the solution? Where do we spend the energy to sustain the energy? Nuclear and beyond (fusion) seems to be the most promising but there is lots of misinformation about the effects of even the worst disasters that could happen while windmills happily chop up whatever golden eagles we have remaining.
Will having unfettered access, innovation and progress to alternative resources get us a solution or will mass murder, government intervention while regressing to the Stone Age prior to extinction be necessary. That's where left and right politics differ.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
All that is being banned is government support of coal mines. If a billionaire wanted to run a money losing coal mine they are more than welcome to. They just won't get any help from the government to keep it open like they would have up to today (2018/12/31).
Closing mines doesn't mean anything, except for impacting the people working there and in the town nearby. The power plants will just get the coal from the mines that are profitable. When the EU is closing the coal fired power plants and replacing them with something that generates fewer emissions then they'll see the reductions that they are seeking.
There's no point in exporting coal from Europe. Local consumption is where it's at.
Ezekiel 23:20
Im in no way 100% anti-coal. I am sure, eventually, we might find some unique use for it. But if its not turning a profit then I see no reason to subsidize it. Eventually something will happen economically where it makes economic sense to use it. If not, natural selection had the final say. Any tampering to accellerste this will eventually have a market correction and it will return practically on steroids. Just let natural selection run its course. If other sources fit the economic model better, then so be it. The real truth will present itself in how much I have to pay for energy. If my bill goes up, then I know that some bullshit took place. Natural selection doesnt work that way.
Most things are taken on faith. Never been to Australia, yet I have faith it exists based on what evidence I have. Never been to the Moon but I have faith that it is mostly as described rather then a balloon launched by the evil Liberals to spy on god fearing Americans. Never seen an atom or even an atom bomb, but have faith they exist based on various things that collaborate there existence. I even have faith that things fall towards the center of the Earth in Australia even though it's below me.
This is life, we have to have faith as we can't check everything out, whether it is geography or science. When there is consensus that Australia exists or the Sun burns by nuclear reactions or electricity works by electrons or that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are increasing and CO2 is a greenhouse gas, most everyone has to take things on faith.
Both geography and science generally get more accurate with time and it would be stupid to deny everything we can't personally check out. Shit, even flying to Australia wouldn't prove it exists as perhaps the plane made a subtle turn and landed somewhere else where everyone pretends it is Australia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
You've obviously never been to Eastern Europe and have no idea what it is like.
Renewables will have a more difficult time becoming ubiquitous, while fighting against the entrenched interests. Also - jerbs!
I think the massive increase in electricity prices they bring due to insufficient battery technology has more to do with it. Renewables are about as big a part of the energy mix as they can practically be right now, without some breakthrough in battery tech. Past some point, more renewables means more natural gas with means more CO2. We are probably already past that point now.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
When you combine socialism with democracy, there is pressure from the electorate to preserve jobs in declining industries. This leads to Lemon Socialism [wikipedia.org], where public funds are used to prop up losers rather than backing winners.
Isn't that what trump is doing with coal?
Trumps economics are pretty far left. Protectionism, propping up failing industries, making promises to support labour are all left policies. Probably why he was a democrat.
It's interesting how the tribalism of the right sees them grabbing leftist policies due to their leader pushing them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
40 percent of the world's electricity comes from coal. King Coal is not going away any time soon.
This will hopefully drive the cost of business for US coal miners way up, since there is now a smaller market of buyers. The real question is why are we providing welfare for the mediocre?
Um, what? The EU closing a bunch of mines will not make the market smaller, it will make it larger. The coal fired power plants in the EU will still need coal, and if they're not getting it locally they will have to import it from somewhere which will drive the price up. That's a good thing for the coal miners, but not for the environment, as it will mean more strip mining in the U.S.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
Actually, it turns out that isn't quite the deal. Mostly for the benefit of their workers, the mines were offered money some years back to attempt a "chapter 11"-like reorganization. As of 1 January, they must either:
The crazy billionaire (or Spanish government) would have to not only pay their ongoing operating losses, but pay back the EU the reorganization support money. Since this third option is extremely impractical, it amounts to an order to shut down.
You're right that it does nothing directly for consumption (Spain imports 90% of its coal already; this will only affect 10%), but by eliminating subsidies on its production, this will drive up the price of coal at least a little bit and further accelerate the switch away from coal.
A pipeline that would be unprofitable and create a much greater risk of environmental damage due to increased tanker traffic just to sell discounted heavy bitumen at a price that is not sustainable. And all the risk would be on BC and all the profit to promote a dysfunctional Alberta oil industry and those have not provinces that would get equalization payments. But BC residents should shoulder all the risk. https://www.nationalobserver.c... While the above link is just an opinion piece, it is much more grounded in reality than the rhetoric being promoted by the the federal government in Canada and the provincial government in Alberta.
Ur $$ for everything I've ever known and loved... the risk is not worth it u greedy fucks.
[($)]
With all the wind power investments which have been made in Europe the amount of power required to run on baseload keeps decreasing. While the rest needs to be covered with a reliable quick-cycling power source which nearly inevitably tends to be natural gas.
At the same time the natural gas reserves in Europe, like in the Netherlands, and the North Sea, keep shrinking. So expect a lot of Russian gas imports in the future for Europe.
Coal gets incredibly expensive the longer the shipping route is because it has so little energy density. Plus most of the high quality coal in Europe has already been mined. It has been mined ever since the Industrial Revolution. China has plenty of crap quality coal to burn right there on their turf. Plus they can import the high quality coal cheaper from places like Australia.
Yeah the fact that they did not fund that pipeline or refineries back when oil was at $150 USD and they could have easily raised the money was dumb as fuck.
sry :)
[($)]
Nah it was dumb not to do it. Instead you guys ship the crude oil by train to the USA and it is refined there. The refineries earn all the money while the Canadian extracts earn less and less. Ever heard of this guy called Rockefeller and Standard Oil?
"EU must not burn the world's forests for 'renewable' energy"
See also: Unintended consequences
The others become MORE profitable.
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
Yeah, no.. not many prophets write out their formulae and methodology in trade journals for all the other prophets to fact check and duplicate. Faith you believe because someone tells you to, science you believe because it can be duplicated and proven.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of time lags in the system, and we have probably already made changes that will result in 2 degrees Centigrade warming...or more. The oceans have been warming and so has the permafrost. (Most of the current rise in sea levels is due to the warming of the oceans, as warmer water takes up more space than colder water down to around 4 degrees Centigrade.)
So while reducing the impact of current actions is extremely highly desirable, it's probably not going to stave off unpredictably unpleasant results. (We can't say just how bad it will be, because we're pushing the models outside the range within which they have been validated. ... And they weren't really good at detailed predictions anyway, which is why an ensemble prediction approach was used, with large error bars.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Huh? Pared-back nothing is cheaper than coal.
If coal is more expensive than renewables in the EU its purely because of taxes placed on coal and subsidies granted to renewables. But on a level playing field coal is way cheaper.
And to top it off, shipping by rail is about as unsafe a method as you can get. One derailment into the Thompson or Fraser Rivers and the entire salmon industry will be hooped. I personally think Alberta should cut off oil flow to BC altogether. I wouldn't blame them if they seceded and went to the USA. And I live in BC. Then it would be easier to get their product to market. I don't think people in BC understand that the only reason we have the standard of living we have is from resources. People in Vancouver think building condos is a sustainable industry. No economic understanding.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
I see a market for superior American coal to power all those EU coal-fired power-plants. We can put our coal miners back to work, provided that safety regulations are enhanced to maximize cashflow. That coal will need to be transported to the customer. I foresee fleets of supertankers outfitted with giant wheels that allow them to cross both mountain ranges and oceans. Make the wheels from frozen humus and the chickpea surplus is solved. Kill two birds, or a farmer and an miner, with one stone I say.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
I live in BC. And probably unlike you, I was born here. Your hyperbole is utter BS, Chicken Little. There are more tankers moving between Alaska and Seattle refineries on a daily basis than a new pipeline will add. Why aren't you crying about those? Probably because the US based environmentalists who make money coming to protest in Canada haven't told you to. smh
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Meanwhile, why aren't you crying about all that coal going out of Delta Port?
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
It would certainly be a lot better if Canada would invest in building refineries adding Canadian jobs and using it's own oil to produce it's own gas. While many like to blame BC, there was a pipeline to the east that was stopped too. And in all the years Alberta was making making profits hand over fist they failed to ever build enough refineries that could turn their heavy oil into a profitable product they just gave tax breaks and ignored the inevitable ups and downs of an oil economy. Look at Alaska permanent fund or Norway's oil savings funds vs. Alberta's historical fund, there's differences, but end of day Alberta had a lot of money that it squandered for decades, and they didn't plan for the inevitable, and are playing the blame game, and BC is a great scape goat.
There's plenty of experiments. Science works by building models and testing models.
Science discovers how gravity works from doing experiments and generalizations. I do not have to do an experiment to tell you how long it would take for an elephant, dropped from 1km in the sky above *Mercury*, to reach the ground. I can predict it, and that prediction is science. It's a conclusion based on a model we generated that has substantial agreement with evidence that is not elephants and is not above Mercury. But the Mercury-Elephant experiment has never been performed -- I am very confident of this. Nevertheless, I can tell you how long it will take, using science.
Not a lot goes over rail and what does is not diluted with chemicals that make it much more dangerous. See this https://altex-energy.com/econo... This isn't like Lac-Mégantic where there is a bunch of flammable liquid fuel. Instead the rail cars are filled with a solid mass, bitumen if you will. If it spills it's totally not good, but won't run into streams and creeks in the same way a tanker spill would of piped product, it would be like a coal spill. But compared to what bitumen with a spill with heavy bitumen in a diluting agent in a marine environment it's not even close to the same risk. We don't even know what it would take to clean up a bitumen spill in a ocean marine environment https://www.theglobeandmail.co... Yet the Canadian government and Alberta government are willing to put all this risk on BC. And people form BC are supposed to be cool with that?
Neither. Scenario 3 is a whole bunch of people (overwhelmingly most of those who have studied the phenomenon) predict that extreme events will permanently increase in rate over time, including high powered storms, and this agrees strongly with observations. They predict a sustained global average temperature rise (note: local average temperature decreases are *not* contraindications), which has been observed although to be fair, this needs a long measurement time (we're looking at permanent >2 degree Celsius change from man-made contributions over 100 years). They also predict eventual sea level rising substantially once a certain threshold is reached, which has not yet been reached. Frost-free season lengthening -- that's held for almost 40 years now. Droughts and heat waves have increased in frequency 10-fold. Arctic is projected to get ice-free summers in about 30-40 years.
Most predictions have come to pass, and a distressingly large number of them are passing in the "worst-case-scenario" version. Not literally every one that has ever been made.
Note, no religion ever snagged 97% of people who looked into it to be followers.
I was born in BC, probably older than you and I am pretty sure I've considered what I say very carefully. My hyperbole to you is real concern. And increasing tanker traffic without ensuring there is a way to deal with mistakes (which of course never happen until they do) is very real. Read my above comments and read this as it explains why the lies currently being perpetuated https://www.nationalobserver.c... Some of us in BC actually care about the planet and about the industries that keep our province an amazing place now and forever and aren't willing to sell them out so Joe Bob in Alberta can have 2 four wheelers, a boat, a $100,000 pickup and a 5 bedroom house. Of course if Joe Bon knew about economics he would have realized his inflated oil economy salary wasn't something he should have banked on.
Exactly!!! But now that the oil prices inevitably tanked, "please bail us out!!!" It's like that asshole friend who got a huge inheritance and blew it on blow and hookers is now complaining that they can't make rent.
Give your head a shake. It needs to be diluted to get into the tankers, 17% diluent vs 30% for pipeline. WP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... And they do use tankers, not box cars. I.e. it is NOT a solid mass. It will still flow into rivers if it derails. The number of spills from trains is 34 times the number of spills from pipelines, and the total amount spilled is 7 times higher from trains than from pipelines. G&M https://www.theglobeandmail.co...
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
We're already there. Most people screaming about science aren't referring to science, they're referring to Scientism.
Standing desks will make us healthy! Eat more superfoods! Poison-infested CFLs will stop global war-err-climate change! Plastic bags not coming from the US or Europe are all over the Pacific so let us ban straws! Muh sex junk black science man!
Pop culture shit.
It's also interesting to see why so many on the left are suddenly against these supposed lefty policies, including pulling out of the middle east.
I'm somewhat immune
Please don't breed.
You're telling me mining in EU countries like Poland or Bulgaria will stop?
I think the only thing anyone will be telling you is that you don't know how to read.
All I ever hear of is the EU banning one thing or another.
That's because you live in what is commonly known as an "echo chamber". This is sad really since in the days of Google the only people who spend their time in ignorance do so willfully.
LOL, the butthurt illiterate distributor of fake news from a few days ago :)
I truly fear for the next generations that really didn't live under the Stasi (and/or those who really want to) and consider it a thoughtful exercise in the confluence of the first, third, and fourth amendments and the second. The Coast will bend willingly. The agricultural and river states...not so much.
Your train of thought halts a few stations too early.
Driving coal prices up will make coal electricity too expensive which will lead to further closing of coal power plants.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Sc 1.: That is a political statement, not a scientific one. A scientific statement cannot make absolute predictions. And there will be a basis of facts and a chain of reasoning. And before that statement is uses as a well-established base of further study or to recommend actions, it will need and get independent verification. If it is an extraordinary claim, it will need extraordinary verification. (Climate Science has that by now and had it for a while.) After all that, it becomes sound Science and something smart people will depend on.
The problem here is that neither your Sc. 1 or your Sc 2. is Science. The root-cause is likely that you do not understand how the scientific process actually works.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Good god. How can you write that with a straight face?
Simple: I actually know how the process works, from both sides. If you propose to "rock the boat", you probably will have to fund things yourself. Research funding is typically only granted for incremental things that assure results.
But I will stop answering you now. Your perception of your own level of insight and your actual level of insight is grossly out of alignment, making you immune to facts. Here is the research result that explains this (although you probably do not have what it takes to understand it): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...–Kruger_effect
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
A minor nit - only fresh water is densest at 4 deg. Salt water expands from its freezing point upwards.
I am talking about climate research. Climate researchers are not bankers.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The market for coal in the US is dropping no matter what the orange turd in the white house claims. The electric generating plants that burn it are closing or converting to natural gas and almost all the planned coal burning plants have been shelved or just completely dropped due to costs revolving around scrubbing all the pollution out of the exhaust from the plants.
Natural gas is cheaper to extract and transport. Natural gas electric plants are much less expensive to build than coal burning plants. The US has an absolute glut of natural gas production. Much of it has been idled because prices are so low. We can open those wells back up by flipping a switch and immediately increase what we are currently producing by 4 to 5 times what we are now. The wells are there and in production they have just been "closed in" because prices are so low. Basically a valve has been shut to stop the flow of gas to the compressor stations and transport pipelines. It's literally a valve and almost all of them can be opened remotely.
We don't have a lot of producing coal mines and getting them going is much more complicated than just saying "open that mine up."
The people who generate electricity want to build natural gas plants, nuclear, or renewable, not coal. It's just so much cheaper. The only people who want to keep coal around are the hillbillies who mine it and the companies they work for that want to get paid for digging it up. They have fooled a bunch of conservatives into supporting coal by claiming "libruls" want to kill off "clean coal" and make all kinds of false claims about it being cheaper and safer.
The same thing happening here is happening in Europe. They aren't building coal burning plants. They are building renewable sites and natural gas plants. They will absolutely convert the existing plants to natural gas or they will shut them down and build a new plant running on natural gas. There is no economic way to ship coal to the EU and have it make any kind of financial sense for them to buy. In fact since EU members signed the Paris climate accords they have already plans in place to phase out all of their coal fired plants. The big dates seem to be 2027 and 2035. Coal mines in the EU don't have to close down, the EU member states just aren't allowed to subsidize them any longer. So it will still be cheaper to get coal locally than to buy it from the US and ship it across the Atlantic and then ship it to coal plants.
So, we aren't going to open a bunch of coal mines in the US. We use less coal each year so there is a dropping demand here. You can't increase supply when there is a lack of demand. You can't really increase demand without huge subsidies and removing a ton of environmental regulations. The EU isn't going to buy our coal because it will still be cheaper to mine it locally without state subsidies for the mines than it is to buy from the US and ship it over there.
This is much more complicated than, they still need coal for their power plants so they will get it from the US. The prices will increase but not nearly enough to make it feasible to ship it across the ocean from the US. Plants in some EU states are built near their source of coal, Germany is a very good example of this. Many of their mines have a conveyor several miles long that takes the coal directly to the power generating plant. They aren't going to close their mine and ship it from the US, it is literally right next door to them.
BTW I was born and raised in the mountains of north Arkansas. I can call folks hillbillies because I am one.
Well, it has gotten rather complex in most areas. But scientists can still judge general merit of well-established facts on other fields with reasonable accuracy. So unless most scientists get indoctrinated in some consistent way (if so, they missed me and some friends of mine), you can check what scientists with no bone in a specific field say about its results.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
If most coal mines close, it will drive up the price and make it profitable again!
Cars contribute immeasurably more to CO2 emission. What to really do something? Force govt agencies to buy electric cars only. Yes, it is more costly, it requires an infrastructure, but it will work, and it is beneficial in the long run because it creates jobs and is basically the same as spending on infrastructure projects which all governments love (employment, kickbacks, hype).
It sucks that nobody in power can think of anything productive to do with single-industry towns when the industry becomes obsolete or unsustainable. Surely the modern economy has some meaningful jobs available?
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The thing that climate deniers on Slashdot should understand more than most is that climate scientists are scientists and love technology and gadgets and shit. If there was any way to believe that we could just keep.going with coal power, scientists would be pushing it harder than anyone.
(And indeed some do, with carbon capture and other assorted "cleaner coal" technology. Full disclaimer: I used to do numeric models for carbon sequestration. I still think it will work as a transition technology.)
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Speaking of misinformation, are you really trotting out the old "send us back to the stone age" bullshit?
When adults talk about this they recognize that no-one wants that, they just have different proposals for how to make life better. They also understand that the effects are fairly well understood at this point, as are the solutions and more important the politics of the solutions.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Mate, I have trouble believing Australia exists some of the time, and I live there.
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It was no more reasonable for the average person to be skeptical twenty years ago, not even slightly. There was consensus along climate scientists then, and people aren't generally any better educated on science now than they were then. Most of them knew jack then, and they still know jack now. Either way the reasonable thing is to trust the people who know more than you do. For the plumber to expect to be trusted in matters of shit and then refuse to trust scientists in matters of science is a truly pathetic disconnect.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"Speaking of misinformation, are you really trotting out the old "send us back to the stone age" bullshit?"
Of course he is. You don't get to be surprised that someone who vomits up garbage about chopping up eagles is full of shit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If we keep burning fossil fuels we're going to select against our species by rendering the biosphere incapable of supporting it. Natural or unnatural, fitness has to include not fouling the nest. We claim Dominion over the entire planet, but we don't even clean up after ourselves. We're no better than rats.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Only if you buy from China. I support all your renewables if the product(blades for windmills, turbines, solar panels) are built in the U.S.. Or the nation that uses them(Europe). I know the natural resources most likely have to be imported(rape another nations land). Nothing can be done about that.
I had my choice, everything would have to be any nation going total renewables must produce the generation materials.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
Trumps economics are pretty far left. Protectionism, propping up failing industries, making promises to support labour are all left policies.
Except for probably the biggest economic choice of the left which is a social safety net of some sort. Hopefully he'll grab hold of that too, with the effects you describe.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Huh? Pared-back nothing is cheaper than coal.
If by "pared back" you mean that a massive freebie of externalised costs is given to coal.
If coal is more expensive than renewables in the EU its purely because of taxes placed on coal and subsidies granted to renewables. But on a level playing field coal is way cheaper.
No, forcing coal to pay for costs that they cause other third parties to incur is levelling the playing field.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Faith is taking something as true in the absence of evidence (and in some dictionary, cannot be based on evidence). But here is the thing all those stuff you said you took at faith value, in reality are based of a lot of evidence you accepted while learning and you are full well aware that most if not all you could check for evidence of it if you had enough money to spend : ,etc...etc...). Basically FAITH you never really revisit the premise. You work around making up excuse - people abandoning faith and switching to another are actually quite rare. That is not the same with TRUST where it can happen often.
* At school you were taught basic stuff trivial you could check for yourself and later on built upon it with stuff you could check on your own time.
* this built upon stuff you could check with lot of time and money (and here we go geology, geography, and most basic science covered).
* None of this is faith based, as you could any time use your money to VERIFY the existence (e.g. travel to Australia) what you meant is that it is based on TRUST , e.g. trust that all the information given to you during school is true
* Science function on a similar system of TRUST, TRUST is not FAITH, FAITH is believing without evidence but TRUST is accepting something as true based on a repeated pattern of evidence presented to you constructed on a pyramide of previous evidence.
* If that TRUST is broken, you then reject the previous accepted facts or rules. FAITH on the other hand simply tend to "work around" that ("he had not enough faith", "my prayer were not answered because of gods not having time/not praying enough/not being worthy", "gods work in mysterious ways" , "satan placed those bones here"
* Only one thing could be said to be "faith" and those are AXIOMS. Which is basically stretching the meaning of faith until meaninglessness.
All of this show you why FAITH is not what we use from scientist to lay person when TRUSTING a result we do not take time to verify ourselves.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The effects are less well known however.
And I call strawman right there.
We know that life as we know it depends on a very narrow margin of conditions. Miniscule changes can have dramatic impact. The eco-system is a chaotic system, speaking strictly mathematically. It is stable within small margins, and can easily go into various runaway positive feedback loops. We have already seen in multiple cases how the introduction of one foreign species can impact a local ecology.
We do not need to know the exact effects to understand that there is a considerable risk involved that has a very real probability of causing damage in amounts that we haven't yet heard about in connection with currency values. Trillions will be the pocket change when we're talking about large parts of coastlines affected.
The other problem we don't know is the economics. How will it affect progress? How will you pay for the solution?
Unlike climate, economics is not a natural system, but an artifical one. Despite all the bullshit rhetorics that makes it seem like economics is some kind of higher power, we humans decide how it works and where it goes. Anyone who tells you the opposite stands to profit from that falsehood.
If you have one system that is based on the laws of physics, and one system that is entirely man-made, it should be clear to anyone with three working brain-cells which system needs to adapt, because there is only one that can be adapted.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
They have now realized that the human race is far too stupid for that
Which oddly enough was way easier to predict.
---
Considerably more than the number of popes.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The article is bullshit, or in todays terms, fake news.
The opposite is true, at least for Germany. We are keeping our old coal power stations running while shutting down nuclear power. There has been a conflict this autumn over the expansion of one of several surface mining sites. This is surface mining - the tiny trails in the foreground are from giant trucks.
Coal is the only energy source that Germany has on its own soil. The amount of oil and gas we have is a rounding error, and there are no uranium mines. That is why all through the Cold War, coal has been kept running with subsidies, for military strategic purposes (energy independence in case of war). Because of that, no transition was even started until fairly recently, and jobs and industries are tied to it that can't be quickly moved elsewhere.
And the government that is using every PR opportunity to point out how conscious of the environment they are is actually doing the exact opposite and has been doing that for years. Brown coal (lignite), the one that you get by surface mining, which has much lower energy density than black (bituminous) coal that you get from mines, is the primary coal used in Germany. Its share of the energy mix has been almost constant for the past 30 years, falling from about 38% to about 29% in that time, or 0.3% per year on average. At that speed, it will be another century until we stop using it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
So in all actuality, it's just a matter of faith that the people who say the math is right are in fact right.
They're having faith in a system. The system takes in people, turns them into scientists and engineers, etc. The end product is technology that would amaze people of previous generations whether they understood the science or not. This would be analogous to witnessing miracles. As a result they trust this system and since the scientists are part of a system that works, they have faith in the scientists. For example, people like their sat-navs and can see that they work. They don't usually know Einstein's field equations or how they're relevant, but they're happy to accept the product exists because scientists and engineers were trusted to do their thing behind the scenes.
In the case of AGW, there is no fancy new toy to play with. In fact they're being told they'll have to make sacrifices. At this point they fear the system is no longer working for them, so they want to peer under the hood and rummage around a little. Their hope is that they'll find some way to put it back on its previous course, where it kept on churning out new products without the lectures on what they should and shouldn't consume, etc.
I see the problem.
You're arguing as if they were skeptics and therefore open to new evidence, whereas you are in fact arguing with cynics who don't give a damn about the evidence.
What's more, you're arguing with puritanical cynics, who in the words of a Victorian author, are insensibly drawn to choosing the facts to fit their theories.
There's no point. In terms of effort, it would be easier to find ways to build a functioning Biosphere II on Mars and move there.
Actual climate skeptics, they're worth talking to, because a skeptic is convinced by data and reason. A cynic isn't and never will be. There aren't many skeptics, they looked at the data and were convinced.
And, yes, some were paid a great deal by rich cynics to find faults. What they found was that there was no fault. The science was sound. The cynics these days try to pretend that never happened. Ruins the narrative.
You can't pretend people are paid to get a given result when you pay them to get the opposite and they still get the same result.
Mind you, I doubt that anyone was paying the scientists back in 1896 to talk about AGW.
But, then, thus is about facts and the cynics don't want those.
I'm not sure what they do want, as they mostly oppose their supposed beliefs of Libertarianism in their opposition to AGW. So I reject utterly the thesis that this is for such political beliefs or, indeed, for anything. It is purely cynical reactionary conduct.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Most people do.
Most people choose not to.
A choice is not an ability.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Prediction is the only valid science - Fred Hoyle
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Thete is no literal proof in science. You're looking for theology.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Well, you won't, because it'll affect you within the next decade and already affects you some now.
But you do explain the turgid mind of the cynic.
You know, I've changed my mind about Mars. Let's deport the cynics there. If climate doesn't matter, they should do fine. Right?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You're telling me mining in EU countries like Poland or Bulgaria will stop? LOL. That will put a major proletariat force out in the street, a force that the yellow jackets will look feeble next to.
No it won't. There is no "mining proletariat" left. Mining is done with machines, and two or three people supervising the machines. The time that mines (and smelters and forges) employed a lot of people was 30, 40, 50 years ago.
I mean, it was the Polish miners who brought about the collapse of Communism, remember?
No it was not. It was a trade union, the trade union of the shipyards.
No, most of coal mining will remain operational in the EU
The article is about closing mines that are subsidized. In Germany that is _every_ mine. The hammer from the EU is only coming because the german governments never dared to completely drop all subsidizing. Hint: if every coal worker would be set free and continued to be payed by the government, the state would pay less than he does at the moment in subsidizes.
Perhaps you should grow up and learn to read some newspapers ... you are out of the loop since 50 years.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Warning people against jumping out of aircraft without a parachute involves gravity the same way as a religious fanatic throwing an unbeliever into a volcano does.
And this falsifies gravity how?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
There are plenty of meaningful jobs and there are plenty of vulture capitalists and banks who can help startups create new ones.
But the cynics out there are bent on preventing new industries and new jobs appearing. They want the status quo as it was in 11,000 BC when Libertarianism was a thing.
(I far prefer the Status Quo of the 80s - Whatever You Want, Red Sky, The Oriental... Good days...)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Most of them aren't idiots: they're old people. It's a perfectly rational decision for them to pretend climate change doesn't exist, because fixing it will cost them money while bringing them none of the benefits. Who cares if it bankrupts their children or grandchildren? It's the same approach they've taken to national budgeting: cut taxes today, let the next generation pay for the debt after we're dead.
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Interesting theory and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter. It should keep the furnace going nicely, all that hot air.
None of those are leftist policies. Do you know what a leftist is? No, neither does anyone else. It's one of those fictional terms invented to deride something you don't understand well enough to describe.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The EU gets about 21% of their electricity from coal, and that isn't going to change.
Yeah actually it is. Here in the UK all coal powered generation is set to cease in 2025 and it has gone from providing 45% of all power in 2012 to now just around 3%. Drax in the UK which was Europe's largest coal powered power station is now almost all biomass and gas. The rest of the EU is following a similar path.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
The ending of government subsidies to coal mines will have an equalising
No it does not.
It is not the coal that is subsidized. It is the wages of the workers. The subsidizing stops, there is less coal on the market (as the mines are closed). If there is a price change it might go up, but it is just more likely that the drop in the ocean that is now no longer dropping is replaced by a few ship loads of coal from China or Australia.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Religion is for dumbasses.
And being a dumbass towards people who follow a religion is 'racist', and dumb.
You probably forgot: humans have a gene for faith and a whole brain region allocated to it.
That is the problem with people who use science for arguments, but know nothing about basics science as in biology and genetics. About the existence of a brain region dedicated to religion and faith, we know minimum since 30 years. Probably longer ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You have to differentiate between lignite and anthracite coal. In Germany only lignite is strip mined but its energy content is so low you have to use it within a couple miles radius. Anthracite instead comes from one-mile deep shaft mines which is so expensive it is far cheaper to import it from strip mines on other continents. After subsidising German anthracite mines for more than 50 years with billions finally the last one closed a couple of weeks ago.
Even if you only read Slashdot, you would only need to look back 2 days for this example.
For a more comprehensive list of EU research projects you would have to look at their web site.
But sure, the EU has failed miserably to accomplish such useful and productive things like starting wars in foreign countries.
anybody at this time can still think this whole thing is not real and not very dire is beyond me. People like you will probably deny there is a problem while in the process of dying from its effects.
Because most people are to young.
They came out of high school or college around age of 20 ... with age of thirty they here: there is a problem with the climate. But for them it was always like it is ... perhaps a very very little bit less turbulent when they where young. I grew up in an area where the christmas temperature was usually below zero, one record night was 31th of december, not sure about the year, but I got my appendix removed on 24th of december. So it must have been 1974 or 1975. In the night from 31th to the 1st of January, or the next night, I don't remember when I was outside around mid night (I think it was from 1st to 2nd), we had -30C. (Five days after christmas). At those times the winters were cold, -30C at night was common. Daytime usually not above -10C. That always lasted from beginning of January till mid or late February.
Two or three years ago we had at 23rd of December +23C. Easy to remember because of the coincident in numbers ...
While the cold was somewhat annoying, and costed us dearly in heating ... it had many benefits, too. It killed insects, like mosquitos. Farmers only needed to plow and not to crush the big shards of soil later, that did the frost. We actually used less salt, because either it was dry, or it was snowing. No freezing rain or half melting snow around. The air was fresh and clean. You had sunshine and not a rainy grey sky for 3 month. I was usually healthy all winter long ... now I have one or two times a cold.
I'm not sure what I'm going to do, but it is actually likely that I spent a big deal of my spring, summer, autumn in future in Asia, mostly Thailand, but the winters in north scandinavia, or Alaska. Yes, counter intuitive ... but the summer in Thailand is not much warmer (if at all) than the summer in Germany. The spring and autumn in Germany is nice. Winter and summer are just awful. Well, summers are getting better, IMHO ... but not better for the farmers. And I miss the true winter.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Here is a primary source: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/...
And here one more news article: https://www.eubusiness.com/new...
Its like every other mining operation:
Gear, maintenance, routines and manpower is costs.
Anything extracted is a net gain. So once you got enough crew to rotate without hiring more people, enough heavy duty machines.
Once mined, possibly refined or extracted your coal competes with the shipping costs to where it wants to go, adjusted for some kind of purity. It can be used to enrich iron or other metals, electricity, and a whole bunch of other options.
So it will be profitable.
Most of them aren't idiots: they're old people.
There's plenty of overlap in that particular diagram.
It's a perfectly rational decision for them to pretend climate change doesn't exist, because fixing it will cost them money while bringing them none of the benefits.
It isn't, either. Not fixing it will cost them money, too. It's already costing money, it's not like that's something for the far-off future.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There are other purposes for coal besides burning it. Coke is needed to refine iron into steel.
None of them, lignite power generation is more of a matter of Central European geology.
Ezekiel 23:20
Which will then restrict both supply & competition
Companies failing in capitalism IS competition.
Ezekiel 23:20
An interesting bit research into extreme events is looking at relative vs expected rates of record setting events. There's a lot of research into this, and there are statistical hallmarks of stable systems that we see breaking down in weather records currently.
As an example, lets say we start taking temperature measurements today. Tomorrow is going to be either a record high or a record low, or the same temperature as today. The day after now has something like a one-in-three chance of being a record. As time goes on, the chance of setting a record high or low goes steadily down, as we've sampled enough of the system to have captured the bulk of the variability in our record keeping. There are little blips around tens, hundreds, and thousands of years generally, as we start capturing further data to see things like the dust bowl or medieval warm period.
If you look at the expected rate of record setting weather events vs current records being broken, it's clear that our climate system is not stable. What's interesting is that you can see this without resorting to any sort of meteorology or climate science - just the statistics of measuring a variable system.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Did you miss the word "unprofitable"? These mines would fail and the jobs would be lost sooner or later without massive government subsidies.
In europe is probably no single hard coal mine that is not subsidized.
So, about what are you talking? Importing coal from China is cheeper than wind power? Well, it is wrong, but a nice hypothesis. Digging your own coal is cheaper? Obviously not, as it is 10 times as expensive than importing it from China ... or USA ... or Chile ... or Australia.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You hit the nail on the head. Here's what being a climate skeptic looks like: The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic.
Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct.
Richard Muller is the poster child for what a real skeptic looks like and how they behave. He saw what he thought were serious errors in measuring climate change, and decided to do it right. What he found was that he just didn't really understand the field, and he didn't understand why things were being done the way they were. He was excessively and very inefficiently thorough, but doing it his own way he got the same answer, because he was rigorously applying proper scientific and statistical techniques. When you do that, reality doesn't change.
What he didn't do was to prosecute climate change in the media, where reality can take a back seat to flash and entertainment. What he didn't do was make some blogs up and cherry pick evidence to feed to an audience who doesn't want to believe. What he didn't do was go into the comment section of articles on climate change and flatly deny everything we know to be true about climate change. None of that is skepticism. It's trolling at the best, or a bizarrely dogmatic decision to be wrong at the worst.
I think his most powerful point, and one that deniers really need to address, is this:
The carbon dioxide curve gives a better match than anything else we’ve tried. Its magnitude is consistent with the calculated greenhouse effect — extra warming from trapped heat radiation. These facts don’t prove causality and they shouldn’t end skepticism, but they raise the bar: to be considered seriously, an alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as carbon dioxide does.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Lots of people can and do have the math skills and the underlying science knowledge. Universities around the world churn out thousands of them every year. You make it seem like this is some black box that 3 people understand, but that's far from reality.
Just because you personally don't understand it, doesn't mean that it's wrong or that nobody really understands it. That's just your appalling ignorance showing.
And saying "the scientists" also makes you look like a dumbass. Which ones? Astrophysicists? Geologists? Oceanographers? Meteorologists? Biologists? Atmospheric scientists specializing in stratospheric aerosols? Because while you don't know this, dozens of fields intersect in climate science. And if one of them was really wrong, people in other fields would notice.
Do you have zero faith in everyone smarter than you? Do you second guess your doctor? Your dentist? At some point in life, most marginally intelligent people recognize that they can't know everything, and they look for ways to determine when they should trust the wisdom of people much more knowledgeable than themselves. If you have a better system to determine the merit of ideas than the university system and peer reviewed publications, we'd all love to hear about it.
All that said, what you're whining about already has been done! If you want a very good example of someone who decided to actually check the climate scientists' work go read up on Richard A. Muller. I even posted a helpful link up above, if google is too hard for you.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Tarsands oil will always sell at a discount. Refining it to gasoline would let you sell it at full price in Canada, instead of paying sky high prices for American gasoline.
Compounding on this, thousands upon thousands of prophets of varying prophetic specialities don't tend to come together to create a bunch of prophetic subsets that are used to test the limitations of and inter-prophetic reliability of other prophecies. While further prophets examine the historic reliability of past prophecies, and use what they find to improve current prophecies, all the while providing a rigorous margin of error for their prophecies.
This is one thing that all climate deniers seem to miss. They have no idea how big the science is, and how very, very deep it goes.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
That's exactly what I mean. The EU is stopping funding and subsidies for coal mining as of today. Not "banning all coal mining", as this futurism website and the headline here on /. suggest. The former is a fact, documented by you (ffkom). The latter is a sensationalist blowing-up of that fact into non-existent proportions, documented by no data or secondary sources. Also known as fake news. Which is my point, and I maintain it.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
about any of it?
[($)]
Cats killing birds at a rate 10,000 times higher than wind and solar power combined .
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Yea, that's why I used Australia as an example, hard to believe such a place exists so takes faith.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Punishing people by death, and even less extreme forms of social coercion, are not people being converted due to their "looking into it" (i.e. making an informed decision after examining the doctrinal claims),
Reading comprehension and logic - you should look into it.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Leftist, support for the common people. Rightist, support for the aristocracy. That's pretty simple. There's also the independent totalitarianism axis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Do you have any actual facts to support your thoughts and "probablys"? Especially since your "probably already past that point now" would mean that there would be actual evidence now of renewables somehow increasing fossil fuel consumption. You "think" its true? Find and post some checkable data.
Currently the EU gets 17% of its electricity from renewables and even real skeptics (using and analyzing data) are not claiming that a renewable "grid apocalypse" until it hits about 30%.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
You can't even define that.
Of course I can, and I did. Life "as we know it", i.e. as we see around us right now. That may have been imprecise because we also know of life that exists in deep sea conditions and some life that can survive crazy radiation, no oxygen and no sunlight, etc. - I should have said "the current global eco-system".
Another - "one foreign species can impact a local ecology." That has what to do with AGW?
It is an example of fragility. You quote selectively like everyone who is trying to avoid the real argument (by cutting it out) and proving his point on selective parts that can be taken out of context and misinterpreted. I'd prefer you wouldn't try such cheap games.
I wrote in the part that you snipped out that the eco-system is a chaotic system, in the sense of mathematical chaos. That means that it can react with dramatic shifts to small changes. I don't have space nor time for a full lecture on chaos theory, so I'll assume you are familiar with it.
The introduction of species is one area where we can observe this clearly.
Ah, you **are** talking about property values.
It isn't property values that cause the main damage. Imagine that a few big cities actually sink below the ocean level - and many of them, like Mumbai, Miami or NYC are close enough that we're not talking 20m change here - sure you can discuss property damage, but what about the impact on travel and trade connections (ports, airports, trains, highways), the impact on business and industry (in the center and on the outskirts, respectively) and ond art, culture and education? You think you can relocate hundreds of museum, universities, offices and factories?
If you're still addressing climate change there, I recommend you look into all the fudge factors introduced to the various models to smooth out their desired, targeted conclusions.
Ah, the usual climate-denier nonsense. Look, hundreds of people who are paid for denying climate change and who actually studied this stuff have been working full-time for years to debunk everything that the scientific community produces. The fact that despite those efforts the results are solid and accepted within people who actually know a thing about it with a majority that would make a USSR politburo blush, is the strongest possible evidence that details might well be debateable, but the core message is as unassailable as anything in science can be.
Doesn't it feel shitty that you're not even paid for the trolling you're doing here, while other people are?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Unfortunately, you have a point.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Indeed. When first made, the climate change claims were extraordinary claims and hence needed extraordinary proof. That proof has been supplied 2...3 decades ago and by now the claim that climate change is not real or nor man-made is the extraordinary claim. Hence the claim that it is not real needs extraordinary proof today. What the deniers have is "I don't believe it".
If this was something not very relevant, I would call the behavior of the deniers instructive and a good example of how not to do it. Unfortunately, what they do is destructive in the extreme and on the level of the whole species. And they provide an "alternative" for those that are undecided, but do not want to face what climate change reduction would actually need to have them do. Hence effective measures get delayed and reduced, which is fatal. My current prediction is 4C (end of the human race) or more. And there is not much time left to prevent that.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You're right, my mistake. The market will remain the same, demand for current supply will increase due to less production.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
Actually the scientists have no more stake in this than the average person on the street. The discovery and verification, as well as measurement and projected results of anthropomorphic climate change is merely a result of their research and not a cause of them. You are confusing the cart for the horse.
The climatologists, as well as the other scientists, neither gain nor lose from the results of their work, and their work will continue without regard for those findings.
If you study fish population and type by taking underwater pictures of a pond, it doesn't matter to you or your study one single bit if you find pictures of trout, catfish, bass, goldfish, or shrimp!
Yeah, shrimp isn't technically a fish, but it can certainly be photographed, and would probably indicate some drastic change in the pond if it used to just be pictures of bluegills for years, and this month it's nothing but shrimp.
As to money... Ever look at a research scientists salary? The only climatologists driving Cadillacs are the ones who inherited them.
Speaking of "follow the money", you really should. All the funding for climatology in the entire world is still chump change from petty cash for even a single oil company. You know, the people that would get the biggest hit to their wallet if something like climate change were accepted by regulators and the public...
So I guess I have to reinforce this statement for you:
FOLLOW THE FOSSIL FUEL MEGABUCKS NOT THE RESEARCHERS SMALL CHANGE!!!
Now of course there's still another point you don't seem to realize. Scientists don't collude. A handful may work together on an occasional project, but the way they make their bones is by proving other scientists wrong! What the F do you think peer review is all about? It's not some mutual masturbation society or anything like that, they TRY to disprove each others work, constantly! That's actually part of their jobs! Why the heck do you think they place such a high priority on releasing data and basically just blow off anything that doesn't release the data? Because it's harder than hell to disprove something without the data, and you can't honestly back something that lacks the data either. Put a dozen scientist in a room together, and they'll come up with 20 different hypothesis and collectively disprove 37 of them! Yeah, the math doens't seem to work out, but those guys really work hard to prove each other wrong...
By the way, when it comes to climate change, they've got the data. They've got mountains of data that supports it. You literally do not even have a hard drive with enough raw storage to hold all the relevant data they've collected over the last century. Hell, over the last 20 years!
And yes, strangely enough, we have scientific data on the climate the precedes the launching of man made satellites. Ever hear of a barameter, or thermometer, or a rain guage, not to mention all the other instruments in the average weather station... Yeah, the satellites let us fill in certain types of data from more of the world that historically had little to no data, but that doesn't mean that it didn't exist. With claims like your's, you'd think the entire series of Xanth novels never exist until after the last one was printed. NOTHING works like that.
By the way, we have data on temperatures and climate due to cooperations from many fields of science, and rather than it just being one point, they have many that corroborate the results, so they can be highly rated as to reliability. I could list them here with their basics, but even the ones I know about would double the size of this huge post, at the very least. Nobody in the sciences is pulling numbers out their ass.
Ah the hockey stick. Yes, the arguments against it are a pretty poor con job. You see, the presenters showing the uptick just showed one nice and obvious segment for the data adverse and scientifically stupid (tv presents and politicians, not to mention high school rejects). That wasn't fake, it was just an easy to understand and recognize examp
I'm more optimistic. The efficiency gains we've realized over the last couple of decades are incredible. LEDs, HVAC, even ICEs are all massively more efficient than their predecessors. At the same time, we're steadily deploying more and more renewables, and they are already outperforming most fossil fuels from a cost standpoint. My house is 2x the size of my parent's house, but it costs 20% what theirs costs to heat and cool. 80 years of construction improvements makes a giant difference from an efficiency standpoint.
Efficiency is self-rewarding. All other climate-based arguments aside, the people who live more efficiently are going to have more money to spend, and the businesses which are more efficient, especially in regards to their infrastructure costs, are going to be more successful. We're not likely to go backwards in this regard. Pretty much nobody will ever again build a new home with a coal furnace in the cellar and crumpled newspaper in the walls. Yet that was not uncommon during the early half of the 1900s.
More importantly, the developing world isn't going to go through the whole power and efficiency revolution that we did. They're going to be starting with our better technology, and advancing from there. China is a good example. Thirty years ago, they weren't building massive fields of solar arrays and wind turbines. And yes, while they are still building coal plants, they're also deploying a lot of renewable energy. Like the rest of the world, financially, it makes sense to be moving to renewables.
We've already made some serious steps towards developing carbon negative concrete, which would be a real game-changer. Cement production releases a ton of CO2, but if it could be made to be a net negative, we'd have industrialized carbon capture. CO2 reinjection into gas wells seems to work, and there are some other promising capture and storage projects under development.
I think we're tantalizingly close to being able to address climate change in a meaningful way. One more iteration on battery storage will get us a very, very long way. Double the capacity or half the price, and storing electricity will become a financial no-brainer for most of the world.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
I think it's what the Republicans are doing for soy bean farmers. Unfortunately, even with that policy a number of farmers in the midwest have gone bankrupt.
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
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Gotta keep on trolling my friend.
for the next 50 years that will be true, that more than 30 percent of electrical power will come from coal.
China is building new coal power plants the world over, and they are the ones driving carbon pollution, what the USA does won't matter.
Canada's current refining capacity slightly exceeds domestic demand. It's also very close to our current domestic crude oil production.
The people who would have to shell out billions for a refinery didn't for a very good reason.
The energy return on investment for tarsands oil make it pretty much unsustainable as an energy source. It IS a fuel source, like mining batteries, but it's only really viable because we have a giant gasoline infrastructure in place. That appears to be changing. Refineries are expensive, and have long payback periods.
No, it's not. You can have all the math chops in the world and it doesn't have the slightest bearing on whether "high level physics" is correct or not.
Science is this odd branch of philosophy that holds that ideas should be tested, and the ones that don't work discarded. Every time you use a computer you test the standard model of physics. The average person tests a good deal of our scientific knowledge more or less constantly. It's so reliable that the average person doesn't even realize they're doing that. Contrast that with religion, which is so unreliable that the occasional false positive or confirmation biased outlier is given a special name: "miracle."
What is a "climate denier"? An attempt to equate people like me with holocaust denial?
I don't know you. I can't comment on you or people like you.
As a general comment, the term arose in general psychological usage during the height of AIDS denialism (i.e. those who deny that AIDS is caused by HIV). It can refer to flat-earthers, evolution deniers, and GMO deniers (i.e. people who believe that GMO foods in general are less safe than the current food supply; it doesn't include people with economic objections).
It can also refer to people who deny historical consensuses, because it's the same psychological processes going on.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Whenever someone suggests that there's a gene, or even a particular brain region, for some higher level behavioural characteristic, you're pretty safe in assuming (taking on faith, if you will) that they're, at best, *vastly* over simplifying.
Assuming you mean the VMAT2 gene, one, unreplicated study, suggested that it might have as much as a 1% contribution to variance in scores on a self-transcendence scale. A third of that scale is a sub-scale measuring "self-forgetfulness", such as the tendency to forget oneself when concentrating on or absorbed in some task. Notably, tendency to believe in any specific religion was shown to be entirely culturally based.
It's all very, very sketchy, but some guy wrote a best selling book, so there's that.
You fail at this, too. Consider deleting your account.
The article is about closing mines that are subsidized.
Every coal mine in the EU is subsidized. There is no mining operation that does not receive some form of financial support in the EU. And most of them won't be closed, because they are more of a social support system than business enterprises. The article, the /. headline, the summary and your imagination are full of bullshit.
There is no "mining proletariat" left
Maybe these Polish miners are robots, then?
https://i.imgur.com/t2hG7RF.jp...
Perhaps you should grow up and learn to read some newspapers
Perhaps you should stop reading science fiction from futurism.org from your basement and get out in the real world more. You'll be surprised how backwards and sad it is compared to your sofa and your computer games.
Pretending science can answer all questions is an insult to real scientists.
I don't know if science can answer all questions, but if it can answer even one it's still more valuable than religion.
It's not the scientists who are spending billions to sponsor climate change denial.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I totally agree. Now go to the next step. In this context what is "rocking the boat"? You haven't really thought this through have you.
From the viewpoint of coal and oil producers who've been making billions by externalising the true costs of their products, anything that might curtail that certainly qualifies as "rocking the boat". Thanks for playing!
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
If moderating "-1, Spite" makes you feel better, okay.
None of this is personal from my perspective. I don't know you either.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Notably, tendency to believe in any specific religion was shown to be entirely culturally based.
Obviously.
However the readiness to change/convert to another one is mind based. Same as being afflicted by religion from what ever culture you come from.
Interesting would be to have an experiment where people are completely barred from religions and mystics during they grow up and when they are set free, ask them about their thoughts ...
(P.S. a positron encephalogram does not lie about your brain regions ...)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Which part of ""mining proletariat" left" don't you get?
There is not even an automotive proletariat anymore. All industries are done by machines.
"You'll be surprised how backwards and sad it is compared to your sofa and your computer games." :D I mostly live in Europe, idiot. There is nothing backward here. The other part of the year Iive in Asia, mostly Thailand, there is absolutely nothing backward here either. No idea in what shit hole you live, though.
Haha
Hint: the mining and steel industry used to have _millions_ yes, in a country of 60 million people at that time (80million now), we had _millions_ of workers in coal mines and the steel industry. Now, 2019, it is perhaps not even 10,000. If you want to call that a 'proletariat', up to you. There are probably more software engineers working at Thyssen-Krupp-Stahl than engineers/workers in actual smelters or other steel manufacturing facilities.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
know of life that exists in deep sea conditions and some life that can survive crazy radiation, no oxygen and no sunlight, etc
Extremophiles do not make do not result in a wide range of life and they'll never be very intelligent, any may not ever have brains just simple nervous systems. "Life" my survive on earth in many different conditions, but life that can get off the planet before it's swallowed by the sun cannot.
Why? It's so much fun watching idiots like you get worked up over this.
My friend you need to realise a very important fact: I only troll those who deserve it.
Every honest climate scientist recognizes that nuclear energy will play a crucial part of any plausible decarbonization pathway
[citation needed]
and yet traditional "environmentalists" are the ones working to kill the tool proven most effective in our efforts.
Which one do you mean, wind, solar, or battery backup?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Is it obvious? Most religions have in common the claim that they are true, and all others are false, and also the idea that every person has a soul, spirit or some essence that is part of or otherwise connected to a deity. Some also claim that a particular ethnic group represents "the chosen people," or, slightly more subtly, that certain types of people are inferior, cursed, or otherwise lesser in the deity's eyes. The non-heritability of specific religions seems obvious from a scientific point of view, but is not obvious from a religious one.
P.S. The analysis of PET images has many of the same problems as any other functional brain imaging technique. Functional PET experiments usually look at differences in the concentration of radio labelled glucose, the idea being that if a particular part of the brain is active more glucose will be delivered to satisfy the increased energy demand. For an active task like finger tapping versus rest the experiment and interpretation is (reasonably) straightforward. But how do you compare religiosity versus rest? Does the active state really represent spirituality, or is it something else (pleasure, fear, the subconscious rolling its eyes)? Also, complex behaviours are complex. Lots of different parts of the brain will have increased activity, and other parts decreased. Many different behaviours will be associated with changes in the same area. The concept of a specific "god spot" has been fairly well discredited. Aside from all that, the "god spot" was the observation that people with damage in the right parietal lobe show increased feelings associated with spirituality, and people describing those feelings show decreased activity in the same general region. Decreased activity. The "god spot" might better be called the "skepticism centre" or perhaps the "reality locus."
Unlike climate, economics is not a natural system, but an artifical one. Despite all the bullshit rhetorics that makes it seem like economics is some kind of higher power, we humans decide how it works and where it goes. Anyone who tells you the opposite stands to profit from that falsehood.
If that were 100% true, you would think we could force our man-made economic system to constantly provide optimal outcomes. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way.
We can't simply change the laws of economics and have it work. They are rooted in sociology, which is unfortunately an incredibly poorly researched field. We simply don't know enough about human nature to bend society and economics to our will. So, although economics is "artificial' in that it's a system made up of humans, it's also a system that developed organically.
One of my favorite examples of the sociological side of economics is the Plano Real.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
in a country of 60 million people at that time (80million now), we had _millions_ of workers in coal mines
You live in some imaginary Poland, idiot. No wonder you don't quite know what you're talking about.
Worked up over what exactly? That you're just a boring, ignorant and illiterate dumbfuck? Please, your kind are the majority on /.
Well, I really hope you are right, but I just do not see it. Especially geo-engineering is basically a hype. The human race cannot do tech on the scale needed.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Except the world's largest lignite burning power station is in Poland, not in Germany. And Poland, being Poland, has squandered a lot of goodwill lately.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Worked up over what exactly?
You tell me, you're the one visibily annoyed by my presence, and it pleases me.
Hot off the presses - one of the things that gives me hope: https://www.bbc.com/news/scien...
Studies show making products more efficient has - along with other factors - already been slightly more effective than renewable energy in cutting CO2 emissions.
The difference is that glamorous renewables grab the headlines.
It's not an all-or-nothing approach. Too much CO2 in the atmosphere has a lot of causes, and a lot of solutions. The key is to work on all of them, not fixate on one of them.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
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I live in Germany, IDIOT.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Most religions have in common the claim that they are true, and all others are false, and also the idea that every person has a soul, spirit or some essence that is part of or otherwise connected to a deity. ... slightly more subtly, that certain types of people are inferior, cursed, or otherwise lesser
If you think that, you don't know much about religions.
I for my part no none that claims that it is the only one true and the others are false, or that they are true as in the sense of truth.
That is one reason for the success of Islam in Asia and partly Africa. Africans converted to Islam so they could no longer be traded as slaves, ironically they became slavers them self and captured people living more inside of the continent. Many parts of Asia where heavy influenced by Hindu, or where Hindi, e.g. what is now Indonesia. So the arab traders told them: "you are all stupid, living in castes, having no power, become muslims, under Allah we are al equal!"
The soul/spirit thing is ofc the tricky part. If you do e.g. martial arts, or yoga or meditate and feel your inner energy it is hard to be not convinced that there is a "spirit" aka Qi/Chi/Ki/Prana. But from my point of view that is easy to accept without need of a religion ... the universe made us like that, why would I need a god to explain my spirit?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.